Barbara Liskov of MIT recently won the prestigious Turing Award, considered to be the 'Nobel Prize of Computer Science.' In addition to a distinguished career in computer science research, Liskov was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from a computer science department in the United States.

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March is National Women's History Month, and it also marks a milestone for women in computer science--Barbara Liskov, a researcher at MIT and the first woman to receive a PhD from a computer science department in the United States was awarded the prestigious Turing Award, considered to be the 'Nobel Prize of computer science.'

Yet Liskov's achievement also highlights how few women are pursuing degrees in computer science. According to an interview with Jan Cuny, program director of NSF's Broadening Participation in Computing program, fewer than one in five computer science degrees are now being earned by women, despite high demand in the field. In this video, Cuny talks about some of the barriers to getting women involved in computer science, and Liskov and Tanzeem Choudhury of Dartmouth College discuss their work and what life is like for women in computing today.

Credit: National Science Foundation/MIT/Dartmouth

Tanzeem Choudhury is an assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth College. She was recently named one of the top 35 innovators in science and technology under the age of 35 by MIT's Technology Review. Her work on developing machine learning techniques can analyze how humans interact with each other.